Mention Mark Kleinman to any business hack and there are three things that they want to know. Just how young is he? How does he get his scoops? And how much money is he on at Sky?

Not that these are unrelated matters. The fact that Kleinman is only 32 and has less than six years' experience in national news makes his knack for ferreting out major stories and his appointment a month ago as the Sky News City editor all the more notable. His name certainly seems to provoke a reaction from rivals, whether it's admiration or resentment at the evident ambition that got him to the top so quickly. Or a bit of both. "He has done well so you have to be careful of sour grapes," says a former colleague, who describes Kleinman as being like Marmite – people either love him or hate him, in part because of his aggressively competitive style. "I get on well with him but wouldn't trust him."

Kleinman has no problem being forward – he made an upfront request for a MediaGuardian interview after less than a month in the job – or even cocky, judging by this recent Twitter post: "FT just put out news alert on RBS story I broke on Jeff Randall's show tonight – well done for watching the TV!"

But in person in his new base in Sky News's rather cramped offices in Millbank, central London, Kleinman is fresh-faced and likeable. The move into television wasn't planned, he says. "I hadn't thought about it at all until the phone call came in and alerted me to the opportunity. I was very, very happy as a newspaper journalist, I loved working in newspapers but it just seemed to me this was an opportunity, to use the cliché, that was too good to turn down."

At Sky he covers big stories on TV and on his blog without the worry of filling a newspaper section, which he had to do in his previous role as the business editor of the Sunday Telegraph. A rumoured £200,000 salary – which he will not comment on – probably helped to make up his mind too.

When he took the job, the City rumour mill was abuzz that Kleinman's friend, Telegraph Media Group editor-in-chief Will Lewis, was so enraged at the defection that he no longer speaks to him. Kleinman gives no impression that his departure was acrimonious, saying that he had a "great time at the Telegraph". "I'm very grateful to the senior people like Will for giving me the opportunity to do those jobs and I hope that they remember me as somebody who worked hard and produced a decent Sunday business section. My time there I look back on very fondly."

Before luring him to the Telegraph and giving him the plum Hong Kong business post, Lewis had hired Kleinman at the Sunday Times business section. Kleinman got his first job on a national in January 2004 at the Sunday Express, after five years on trade magazines, including Marketing. One of his first jobs was working for the leftwing Labour MP Lynne Jones.

Kleinman has operated outside the magic circle of former Financial Times journalists who have risen to prominence in recent years such as the Times editor James Harding, the BBC's business editor Robert Peston and Lewis. But it was his ability to deliver exclusives, including Dubai Ports World's multibillion-pound bid for P&O and Sir Victor Blank's departure from Lloyds Banking Group, that brought him to Sky's attention.

So what is the secret of landing a scoop? "It's all about your contacts, it's all about being trusted and it's all about demonstrating that you have an understanding of the stories you're trying to cover," Kleinman says. "And it's also frankly about hard work."

One industry story had Kleinman sweet-talking a secretary at an advertising agency into telling him the name of everyone working on a particularly newsworthy account. He phoned each one. "Essentially what it boils down to is you are out there early in the morning and late at night and building relationships with people. There's no bigger secret to it than that." It is essential he keeps those contacts up in his new post, he says. "I'm spending a lot of my time with my contacts, either in person or on the phone. I should say so far Sky News have been absolutely fantastic about letting me have that freedom to get out there, because they realise I'm not going to break stories if I'm literally on air all the time or tied to my desk or in a position where I just can't speak to my contacts."

Sky's swoop for Kleinman was widely seen as an attempt to mount a challenge to Peston, another former business editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who became a household name as business coverage shot up the news agenda. For many television viewers, Peston became the media face of the banking crisis after an agenda-setting scoop in September 2007 that Northern Rock needed emergency funding, which was followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing financial crisis.

Kleinman is keen to play down any sense of rivalry and the tag of "Sky's answer to Robert Peston". "Robert is one of the foremost journalists in the country, let alone business journalists, so it's an incredibly flattering thing to be called," he says. "Robert, the BBC and Sky News have different audiences, Robert and I have different contacts, and we are interested in different things."

He adds: "It's very flattering that Sky News came to me to lead the news agenda in that sense, but in terms of the direct comparison with Robert I think those things are slightly meaningless."

Kleinman backs Peston's handling of the Northern Rock story, which some people claimed encouraged the panic that led to the first run on a British bank since the 1860s. He says he would have done the same as Peston. "As long as I knew the story was true, which he obviously did, absolutely. I think Robert actually treated that story very responsibly, he knew the story was true before he went with it. You have a responsibility to inform your audience of important stories like that – the people who criticised him for being irresponsible for breaking that story are frankly misguided."

Under the deal to lure Kleinman from the Sunday Telegraph, he will regularly appear on Jeff Randall's nightly business show on Sky and he is also writing a weekly column for the Times, which starts tomorrow, and contributes to the paper's news coverage on an ad hoc basis.

He says the powerful City PR firms, such as Brunswick and Finsbury, that can act as important brokers of corporate information are not a primary source of stories.

"In my experience very few stories are given to you by the City PR firms. I think it's important to have a relationship with them because they are generally of a decent standard and they understand what's going on in their clients' businesses; but I think their role can be slightly exaggerated, in the sense that if you're close to the PR firms does it mean you get stories? No, I don't think it does."

He dismisses the idea that Sunday papers benefit from the once-notorious "Friday night drop" of stories spoon-fed after markets close. "I just don't think that that culture exists any more," he says. "There are very strict rules about disclosure of information. That's certainly not the way that I was getting my stories."

Kleinman's 18-month stint at the Sunday Telegraph was admired by his peers and offered stiff opposition to the better-resourced Sunday Times. In fact, Kleinman acquired so many bylines that some weeks it seemed he was writing his section single-handedly, leading hacks on other papers to dub it the Sunday Kleinman.

But, after two years when business was the biggest story in town, are things about to quieten down? Kleinman seems confident that they won't. "There's no doubt that we've lived through two of the most interesting news years you could imagine having during your career as a business journalist, but I don't think it's going to calm down, particularly over the next year or so."

Making the move from print to the screen can be tricky, but there is the general election, corporate refinancing, public spending cuts, and then the endlessly controversial question of bank bonuses. If the future looks turbulent for Britain, it could be good news for Mark Kleinman.